Kevin Walsh

The proposed project, Human-environment interactions in Mediterranean Mountains: A case study in characterising the Anthropocene, builds on research where I co-direct international multidisciplinary teams that combines humanities and natural sciences in mountain Archaeology and Historical Ecology.

Recently, many scientists have accepted the notion of an Anthropocene—a period when environmental systems are dominated by human influences, or when human activity has a significant effect on the environment. One fundamental area of debate is when this period started. This proposed project will examine published and unpublished data from four different Mediterranean Mountainous areas. Whilst reference would be made to work carried out by the applicant in the Alps, this project will engage with new data from; i) Corsica, ii) Crete, and iii) Atlas mountains (Tunisia).

The premise for this project is that that certain landscapes have been more susceptible to human influence than other landscapes. Mediterranean landscapes, and in particular, Mediterranean mountains, are some of the most sensitive environments globally—mountain landscapes are especially sensitive to both climate change and human activity. However, even where we can demonstrate that people and/or climate have caused environmental degradation, it is apparent that many mountain communities across the Mediterranean have developed resilient socio-economic strategies. These strategies have often restricted the extent to which some mountain landscapes have passed non-reversible "tipping points", i.e. a point when an earth system is highly susceptible to degradation that can be caused by only a small change in that system.

More specifically, this project would assess the chronology of the key phases of human exploitation of high altitude environments across a sample of Mediterranean mountains in terms of (i) the nature of these phases of exploitation (i.e. types of economic activity), (ii) the evidence for climatic or anthropogenic impact on the environment, and (iii) the evolution of forms of human management strategies that have mitigated environmental problems. This will allow the analysis of different trends in environmental change, human activity and exploitation of the chosen mountain ranges. This analysis would be situated within a historical ecological framework, which would explicitly avoid monocausal explanations (e.g. relating changes in human activity to changes in climate).